me, wine, pages and pages

NaNoWriMove!!!

Finally some time to write. Going through pictures again in my head on the way home, thinking “I want to record the world.” Starting in the wine world and wine country and going through the pictures I already have, what I have in this camera, shots I’ve forgotten about. Small sip of the coffee I took from Emma’s school, and I’m on my way. The principal there told me after I asked, “Oh yeah… go ahead! This is for parents!” Still sounds weird, hearing me called ‘Dad’ or a ‘parent’. But that’s me, that’s my now, that’s me in this now.

Shot— me kneeling in an old Zinfandel vineyard somewhere in Dry Creek. I somewhat remember taking this last year, then don’t. I just stare at the colors. Not thinking anything specific but just looking, staring, daring myself to capture and think more. Then I realize how many people come from everywhere, all over the everywhere of our planet’s everywhere to see what I’m looking at in this shot, kneeling in front of the vineyard knowing that would change the writer’s day. At it did. The vineyard always changes me. Not sure how, but— well yes I am. Calms the writer, heals him, prepares him for his day.

The rocks around the root or base of the plants shows me odd and quirky and strangely motivating formations. Easily worth a day’s thousand, those square-like and quasi-rectangular entities. They laugh at me, wonder why I’m shooting the plant so much, why I’m spending so much time there in the vineyard with them. I inquire the like, but I don’t need an answer. The vineyard is a place of Nows, Nows that force sense from stubbornness, telling a hyper and tireless, fiery writer like me to take a moment… just take the moment for what it offers. They propel parables, all of noted note, sans farceur. I keep my knee to the damp soil, and I don’t give any kind of a care as to the print it leaves on my work clothes. This is our intersection, the vineyard’s and mine.

More coffee, and I see everything I write as a letter— This entry a letter to the this very block, and a lengthy apology as to why it took so many days and months, probably well over a year to start my translation of the image, to better appreciate her, the vine, and all around her. The fires recently also serve as a meteoric urge.. to stay in the vineyard, stay out there, photograph everything out there. Even if you go to the same block it won’t provide redundancy, ever. It’s a new character and language the next day, the next week, season, year. Looking under the collection of para-canopies, I see an electric and multi-palette’d infinity, lost in the terroir cosmos, me the staring writing who just wants more juxtaposition of my Now to the Now of the soil, leaves, rocks, irrigation lines. Soft but rhetorical, fervent red, orange, yellow breath, green whisper-talk…

The sun, dialogue of truth and humility, letting itself fall on the vines like Cheshire stares and promises. Wanting to photograph more, if not today then surely tomorrow when back at the Roth property, I’ll shoot everything. Not that I’m a pro photog’, or even photojournalist, but I see too many with cameras looking for the perfect shot, looking too much to stage and orchestrate, position, that pose. Why not just shoot, capture what’s there. Is that not what a photojournalist does, or writer or blogger even? Maybe I’m lazy, hence the knee in the Zin row, not standing walking around looking for that perfect degree of light, that marketable tint, contrast, framing, imagist envelopment. I just shoot where I am, record… recording the world means, to me, telling what I see. There is no staging, there is no ‘If I only had just a little more light…’. No. It’s truth. It’s the Now. The Now can not be prodded, or poked. I translate the Now, my Nows, the Now in that vineyard where I had to see it before staring the day— Or wait, was this shot at day’s end, in that Zin block just across the street from the Dry Creek General Store? Can’t remember now. And as I’ve intoned, it doesn’t matter.

If only I could elasticize this sitting, till 16:00-something when I have to get the little Beatniks. Coffee cold, don’t care. May need a restroom break in a bit but I’ll hold as long as I think I can… more pictures…. UGH. Why did I wait so long, with all this work just sitting here, there, rotting in my goddamn camera? That does me no good to get so irked with my ways, the past year or more, yes more, of procrastination and just shooting and in-the-drawer-shoving.

Moving eyes to the dirt, also woke by sun’s paragraphs, day’s chapter— rich and soft, formidable but delicate and rhythmic, swaying a certain axiomatic thought front through the continent of my world view. I’m in the wine world, Sonoma County, where there are post cards in distant airports to get people eager and overeager and naively excited about what’s at the end of their proximal plane ride. I’m here, right now, in this picture and this morning. No fire or firestorm or whatever that was a month ago can stop urging and surging recital like this… the vines thank me and I them eternally since we need each other in more parameters and placements and contexts than anyone could ever list.

09:45… not even an hour into the morning’s shift and I want to leave, go photograph a vineyard, somewhere, maybe Benovia as they’re not even a mile away (I don’t think…). Sure. Why not. When done editing and seeing what I just said for the last however many syllables about my vineyard collections, right there in Dry Creek, wherever in Dry Creek I was. Looking again, the frame teaches me something about my photog practices… get closer. You’re not close enough. Now I do want to go out and get some shots…. Close as I can, of bare vines, just after harvest, just after the rain we had last night and a tad this morning. Get closer, by there. Now, for a new vine’d Now. That’s what I want my babies’ DAD to do.